Format: ORAL

Wesley M. Knapp

NatureServe, Arlington, Virginia, USA

NatureServe is a conservation non-profit based out of Arlington, VA, USA that has a foundational role in North American conservation. NatureServe works with 60+ Member Programs (usually but not exclusively referred to as Natural Heritage Programs) to answer the three questions of conservation: What species exist, where are these species found, and how are these species doing? NatureServe is a Red List partner but maintains a distinct ranking methodology that has been used to assess over 100,000 plants, animals, fungi, and natural communities. The NatureServe Network maintains a robust geospatial database that includes over 1,000,000 on-the-ground locations of rare species. NatureServe partners with numerous other organizations to maintain taxonomic currency (including but not limited to the Flora of North America committee, USDA-Plants, and Missouri Botanical Gardens Tropicos Database). NatureServes ranking system of G-, N-, and S- ranks are integral to conservation as these ranks are a valuable prioritization complement to legal status designations assigned by government agencies such as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service in administering the U.S. Endangered Species Act (ESA), and the Canadian Ministry of Environment and Climate Change in administering the Species At Risk Act (SARA). Integrating the best available taxonomy presents a pressing conservation challenge. The intersection of taxonomy and conservation is often misunderstood, difficult to understand, and confusing for the non-expert. This can lead to the misallocation of precious conservation resources, inappropriate decisions about what species should be conserved, and what natural communities should be restored or managed. Great conservation liabilities exist when there are taxonomic disagreements and misalignments. During this presentation, I will give examples of how disagreements or misalignments have caused negative conservation impacts, discuss how NatureServe presents a multi-tiered taxonomy, and propose possible solutions to the botanical community.